This invention relates to social networking, and in particular to inferring a social networking system user's family relationships from social information about the user and the user's connections stored in a social networking system.
Social networking systems allow users to create accounts that are tied to their identities. Users of a social networking system may create user profiles that store information that they choose to share with the system. A user's profile may include, for example, information about a user's age, gender, employer, alma mater, and marital status. Social networking systems further allow users to specify connections to other users of the system. When users form these connections to other users it is sometimes referred to as “friending” or “connecting.” The users that are connected to a specific user are called the “connections” or “friends” of a user.
Additionally, the social networking system may store information indicating a relationship between users that are connected to each other in the social networking system. The relationship may indicate, for example, that a user is a “family connection,” such as a spouse, sibling, parent, or child, of another user. However, the relationship information collected by the social networking system for connections may be incomplete. For example, users may fail to identify family members that are connected to them in the social network because it may not occur to them to provide such information, or providing such information may be an inconvenience.
While social networking systems can mandate that their users specify certain information related to their relationships, such a requirement may likely degrade a user's experience, as users may not be prepared to spend the time to provide data when requested.